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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Even some seasoned quiz winners admitted that they'd forgotten Gene Wilder was in this week's movie in question, the 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde. (That's why I added the second, easier picture clue with Faye Dunaway.) It was Wilder's first film, Dunaway's first lead role, and the breakthrough movie for Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons, as well as the picture that made Warren Beatty a superstar. It was also the film that is usually credited as the first "new" American film that broke away from the older studio conventions, as well as the introduction of realistic film violence.

After it became a hit, kids all over the country were gouging fake bullet holes in their clothes and pretending to get shot to pieces, but it took a long time for Bonnie and Clyde to reach that point of popularity. The script by Robert Benton and David Newman (their first) was turned down by all the studios, even though it drew the interest of both Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. (Truffaut even added a scene, Bonnie's poem recitation.) Beatty eventually bought it to produce himself (another first-- actors didn't usually do that, especially young ones) and brought in director Arthur Penn. Penn liked the New Wave approach of the script but felt that to actually make it like a French film would be a mistake, and gave it the period 1930s American look and feel that it's remembered for today.

Penn's choices for his cast were impeccable. After turning down other, better known stars for the role of Bonnie (and being turned down by his first choice, Jane Fonda), Penn cast Faye Dunaway after meeting her briefly at Beatty's suggestion. The alien-looking Michael J. Pollard (in the second picture clue with Faye) was given the role of sidekick C.W. Moss because he seemed to move and talk so differently than everyone else. (No kidding-- as one quiz winner put it, "Did he ever play anyone that wasn't fucked in the head?") Everyone in the cast was nominated for an Oscar, and Estelle Parsons won for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

The violence in Bonnie and Clyde made it controversial, primarily for two reasons: the way the film combined comedy and brutality in the same scene, and the way Penn filmed gun shots. Blending laughs and bloodshed is old stuff today, but reviewers at the time railed against the film for the way it went from comedy to tragedy so abruptly. This was made more jarring by Penn's breaking with Hollywood tradition when it came to filming a gun fight-- until Bonnie and Clyde, Hollywood films would only show the gun being shot, then cut to the actor getting hit. Penn insisted that the gunshot and the injury occur in the same frame with no cutting. And of course, nothing like the final gundown had ever been seen before.

Congratulations and a ride with Parker and Barrow to the following quiz winners: Wayne Palmer, Song-Un Lee, Bob Redwing, The Mississippifarian, Jack Sparks, Nancy Louise Rutherford. Kenneth Gramer, Bill Kelly, Dean Carlson, Joe Rosenberg, Michael Mattson, Fred Lorence, Christina O'Sullivan, Thomas Miller, John Seffl, Bill Hearne, Dave Mallow, Spencer Abbe, Kent Hofmeister, Aaron R. Teschner, E. Yarber, Kevin Musolino, Vince Tuss, Denny Lynch, Paul Rignell, and Corey Anderson.

Posted by Steve Monaco at May 12, 2008 12:45 AM

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